As you walk down a dark hallway the smell of death and decay ambushes your senses. Faint screams in the background set your heart racing. Satanic markings cover the halls like demonic wallpaper. You notice blood stains on the floor and wonder, "Where the HELL am I?" You’re not in hell, but close. You’re in Byberry Mental Hospital.
In the eighteenth century a man named Benjamin Rush made major advances in the field of psychology. He believed that insanity was a disease rather than a spiritual symptom. He was from a tiny suburb of Philadelphia called Byberry. Although he died on 1813 his influence would live on.
If you were insane and lived in Philadelphia in the 17 and 1800's you would probably be placed in the Philadelphia Almshouse. Opened in 1732, the Almshouse housed orphans and the elderly as well as the insane. The Almshouse was moved and expanded several times. Then in 1883 it was relocated to the Blockley section of West Philadelphia, where the institution became known simply as Blockley. On the night of Feb 12, 1885, disaster struck when the Blockley had a fire. Since all of the patients were shackled together, many burned to death. After the fire the city started to look for a new location to house the insane.
More than 20 years later the City Council bought 874 acres of farmland to build a new facility. The new location was in the suburb of Byberry, the former home of Benjamin Rush. They began construction on a new facility which would become known as Byberry City Farms. On July 3, 1907 six patients were moved from Blockley to Byberry City Farms. Relatives of the insane were excited about the new hospital because it was a much needed improvement over the old insane asylum in Philadelphia. It would not be long before their minds would be changed though.
Over the years the City of Philadelphia added more buildings and changed the name of the facility to the Philadelphia State Hospital. The asylum soon became over-crowded and under-staffed and reports of patients being abused and killed were not uncommon. Patients would sleep naked on the floors, in hallways and in the basements. Some became extremely violent and started to kill each other or commit suicide.
In his book Great and Desperate Cures (Basic Books, 1986), Elliott S. Valenstein described the state of mental care in the U. S. at the time:
It was a hopeless, depressing atmosphere; and psychiatrists themselves had to struggle not to be engulfed by it. A series of exposes in the 1930s and 1940s describing the “ugly,” “crowded,” ”incompetent,” perverse,” “neglectful,” “callous,” “abusive,” and “oppressive” conditions in state mental hospitals effected little change.
Patients were beaten, choked and spat on by attendants. They were put in dark, damp, padded cells and often restrained in straightjackets at night for weeks at a time. Life magazine’s article “Bedlam 1946” vividly described the deplorable conditions that existed in most of the 180 state mental institutions. The conditions were said to have degenerated “into little more than concentration camps on the Belsen pattern.” A photograph taken at Philadelphia’s Byberry Hospital showed nude male patients on concrete floors: they were given “no clothes to wear and live in filth,” with neither exercise nor any other activity or therapy to relieve them.
Not only did patients kill one another, attendants were often responsible for the rape and killing those in their charge. After many such instances the Federal government decided to take over Byberry. Still the abuse and torture continued and after much legislation the decision was made to shut Byberry down in the 1980s.
About thirty buildings were abandoned at that time and left just as they were. After Byberry was shut down, people looted the buildings and made a killing on the copper pipes that were left. There have been numerous bodies found in or around Byberry and the police have stated that they think the murders/suicides had something to do with abandoned hospital. Some people even claim that Byberry is possessed. I don't know if this is true, but many who have visited there report having had supernatural experiences.
Allegedly a satanic cult took over Byberry and desecrated the hallways with their evil markings. You can still see the corpses of animals used as sacrifices for their rituals. Dogs hang from ceilings, chickens with their heads cut off lie on the floor and blood stains serve as a testament to the horror of this cult. It got to the point where the police found bodies around Byberry all cut up like they were part of a satanic sacrifice. It got so bad that my neighborhood organized a meeting with the Philadelphia police to get rid of the devil worshippers. The big field in front of my house and right behind Byberry was filled with cop cars and my neighbors were right behind them. I think that the raid must have worked, because the satanic cult didn’t last that much longer. But who knows, the cult could have just moved deeper into the darker recesses of the forlorn buildings.
–Mark Werner http://www.darkhosts.com/asylum